“I have three, soon to be four, great-grandchildren,” Shultz has explained. “I’ve got to do what I can to see that they have a decent world. And if we let this go on and on the way it’s going right now, they’re not going to have one. Getting control of carbon is right at the heart of the problem.”

It will be Shultz’s first visit to the Capitol in 20 years. He is working with Partnership for a Secure America, a bipartisan foreign policy think tank that compiled a climate change letter signed by other leading Republicans such as Tom Ridge, Richard Lugar and Carla Hills. Lots of Republicans are having doubts about the party position on climate.

Shultz is concerned that climate change is a “threat multiplier” to national security that will foment global resource shortages and political instability. A raft of reports from the Pentagon and other agencies have reached similar conclusions.

All this puts Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State on the same page as uber-liberal Sens. Barbara Boxer, (D-CA) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT) in backing a carbon tax. Boxer and Sanders introduced legislation to implement a fee-and-dividend tax on carbon that would remit most of the revenue back to consumers. Their proposal is clever way to void political opposition and distributional issues, although it is muddied intellectually and politically by subsidies to renewable fuels. A tax would obviate the need for subsidies.

Boxer’s heft as chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee was enough to move the National Association of Manufacturers to pay for a study purporting to show the tax would “wallop” the economy, even though it did not include the astronomical cost of adapting to climate change and cleaning up after disasters like Hurricane Sandy, the continuing Midwest drought and worsening Western water shortages.

President Obama has spurned a carbon tax but is expected to take executive actions, namely an EPA rule to limit greenhouse gas emissions by existing power plants. His nominees to head the EPA (Gina McCarthy) and Energy Department (Ernie Moniz) are seen as clear signs of his intentions.